Mark Steyn: I ‘find myself being fitted out for a supporting role in Friday’s evil slaughter in Norway’

The mass murderer Breivik published a 1,500-page “manifesto”. It quotes me, as well as several friends of NR – Theodore Dalrymple, Daniel Pipes, Roger Scruton, Melanie Phillips, Daniel Hannan (plus various pieces from NR by Rod Dreher and others) – and many other people, including Churchill, Gandhi, Orwell, Jefferson, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, not to mention the US Declaration of Independence.

There have been over 10,000 Islamist terrorist attacks, many of them against Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and others. The number of such attacks against Muslims in the West or indeed in the world is perhaps one percent of that number.

Any terrorist who attacks Muslims or tries to kill other people because they work for governments or belong to a left-of-center political party, as in this case in Norway, will be denounced by his entire society, apprehended, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. All of the media, all of the intellectuals, all of the government officials will denounce this person in the sharpest terms This is hardly ever true in Muslim-majority countries.

…he killed the children of those Norwegians who, in his opinion, were enabling Muslims to set up separatist and hostile enclaves in Norway.

Will this terrify the multi-culturalists as much as Islamism has? Will Breivik’s dastardly, dreadful action lead to policies which willfinally begin to deal with issues such as female genital mutilation, polygamy, forced marriage, and honor killings on Norwegian soil? (…)

The left-leaning multi-culturalists and “progressives” in Norway have refused to help endangered Muslim girls and women in their midst; the Norwegian government has refused to limit forced marriages to illiterate home country cousins, nor have they effectively intervened in matters of domestic violence when the perpetrator was Muslim as was his victims. (…)

Native Norwegians have learned to live cautiously. Gay couples dare not hold hands in public in parts of Oslo. Since the 2006 bombing of Norwegian embassies (due to a Norwegian publication of the Mohammed cartoons), Norwegians have not dared to “say anything critical or negative about Islam…such comments are reserved for safe, private conversations.”

Yes, there is plenty of blood and guts in the Old Testament , but as Raymond Ibrahim points out, the references to those battles are “descriptive, not prescriptive,” and reflect history rather than theology. There is nothing in the Bible remotely similar to the numerous commands to wage war against the infidel that can be found in the Koran, the hadiths, the biographies of Mohammed, and 14 centuries of Islamic jurisprudence, commentary, history, and theology.

Nor can one find Christian clerics or scholars praising and justifying religious violence, whereas numerous respected Muslim religious leaders do so on a regular basis, for the obvious reason that it is doctrinally legitimate and traditional. The continuity of this 14-century-long tradition can be traced starting with Mohammed’s farewell address in 642, when he said, “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’” This incitement to religious violence was repeated by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979: “Until the cry ‘There is no God but God’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.” It was repeated by bin Laden in 2001: “I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammed.” And it was quoted by the Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hassan, in a power-point presentation at Walter Reed Hospital. No such tradition exists in Christianity or Judaism, because theological violence is not part of those faiths. (…)

EUtopia has marginalized legitimate nationalist and religious identity and exalted in its place some mythic transnational cosmopolitanism and sentimentalized multiculturalism alien to the lives of most ordinary Europeans. As such it creates the conditions in which extremist, if not neo-fascist varieties of nationalism, can flourish, particularly given the growing problems of marginalized and unassimilated Muslim immigrants.